There comes a time, for all of us, when we begin to ponder our legacy, when our past meets up with our present, and we start to think about that which we leave behind.

It’s not so much the money in our bank accounts, or the physical assets bequeathed to heirs and charity, but more often the intangible perception of the humanness we have left in our wake, the sense of self we have imprinted on others.

Was I a good father, a loving mother, a supportive sister, a kind brother? Will my children, and grandchildren, speak of me often after I’m gone, with love in their hearts? Will my friends recall our relationships with fondness, and smile when they think of our time together?

Am I a person worth remembering?

Gary Tate knows such a person, the kind of person whose well-lived life left an indelible mark, and whose death left a hole in his family’s world.

Here’s what Tate wrote recently in an email to me, about his father-in-law Nigel Clark.

“I’ve met Chris Hadfield, pro sportsmen, wealthy businessmen and the like. None had Nigel’s determination. Nigel Clark was the most accomplished man that I have ever met; he was my father in-law. A hero.”

Here, then, is Nigel Clark’s story.

He was born on Sept. 12, 1930 in Eastend, Sask., a prairie baby and the second youngest of eight children. Like many of his generation, his family made their way out west in 1942 and, as a young man with ambition, Clark would go on to graduate from the University of B.C. in 1956, a freshly minted medical doctor.

It was the same year he married his life’s love, Shirley, after their fortuitous meeting on a Vancouver tennis court.

The couple’s future, though, was to be in Lillooet, where Clark soon moved his new bride to start a family practice with his doctor brother Michael.

In 1958, the Clarks’ first child, Lisa, was born, and before long would come four more children: sons Jess and Spencer and daughters Beth and Jody.

It was a good life, dad taking care of the people in the small town, and mom at home raising a batch of boisterous kids. In many ways, it was an ordinary life.

But it would soon become extraordinary.

On Jan. 20, 1963, when he was 32 years old, Clark fell 150 feet down an icy slope on Mount Brew near Lillooet while trying to rescue an injured hiker in the dark.

Clark had volunteered to join the rescue because he was the town doctor, and because the young man, who survived his injuries, was the son of his secretary. The fall, however, would prove catastrophic for Clark, crushing his spinal cord and leaving him a quadriplegic in a wheelchair, with only 10 per cent hand function.

The reality for the young family was unavoidable. Shirley was pregnant with their fifth child when she stepped on the rescue helicopter to accompany her husband to a Vancouver hospital.

Doctors didn’t have insurance back then. Clark wasn’t even expected to survive, but when he did, it was clear he would no longer be able to practise medicine as he had. But he still had to find a way to support his wife and children, so they packed up and moved back to Vancouver.

A series of Vancouver Sun stories and photographs, published in 1963 and 1964, detailed Clark’s daring deed, the accident and the aftermath. An Oct, 1, 1964 story, with a photograph of Clark in his wheelchair with Lisa on his lap, related his resolve to enrol in a three-year postgraduate program at Vancouver General Hospital, and the promise made on his behalf by then Premier W.A.C. Bennett that the government would do all it could to help him.

A later story reported that “Dr. Nigel Clark, hero of a mountain rescue operation” would receive special government aid of $500 a month for three years to allow him to re-establish himself in the medical field.

And re-establish and rehabilitate himself he did, settling the family into a Richmond bungalow, working hard at the G.F. Strong Rehabilitation Centre and eventually regaining some function in his arms, enough that he could drive. And work.

And, yes, he went back to school, retraining as a diagnostic radiologist and landing a job at VGH, where he would practise for the next 32 years.

That wasn’t enough for his busy mind, however, so he took up teaching, as a clinical professor for his alma mater.

When Clark retired in 1995, at 65, it was not to idleness. He and Shirley moved from the city to the big log house they had built in Abbotsford, and there was gardening, pond building and wood burning art to keep him busy. There was also furniture to make, metal to weld and poetry to recite, especially Robert Service and Robert Frost. And there was the next generation — grandchildren Nigel, Rhys, Marshall, Delacey and great-granddaughter Skylar — to spoil.

Life, again, was good, but there would be more pain: In July 2011, Clark and Shirley lost their 50-year-old son Jess when he was hit and killed by a truck in New Brunswick while cycling across Canada.

Not long ago, Clark’s health began to deteriorate and last month, on April 13, he died, family members and his wife of 58 years by his side.

If Clark was a quadriplegic for 51 years, it never defined him, and it never stopped him, which is why Gary Tate, who is married to Lisa, thought his story was worth telling.

“We never thought of him as handicapped,” says Lisa. “I don’t think he saw himself as handicapped. He lived a very independent dependent life.”

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